This invention relates to the production of .alpha.-olefins by the catalytic dehydration of 2-alcohols.
It is well known that alcohols may be dehydrated to produce monoolefinic materials by passing the alcohols over the heated oxides of certain metals, such as aluminum oxide, thorium oxide, silicon dioxide, titanium oxide, magnesium oxide, tungsten oxide, chromium oxide, and zirconium oxide or mixtures thereof. The prior technical literature on the subject of this type of catalytic dehydration indicates that alumina, thoria and several of the other metal oxides and equivalents in their dehydrating effect and usually may be used interchangeably. Pines and Haag have reported in a paper published at page 2847 of volume 83 of the Journal of the American Chemical Society (1961) that .alpha.-olefins (terminally unsaturated olefins) may be obtained by dehydrating primary alcohols over an alumina catalyst. These workers further state that when 2-alcohols are dehydrated over the alumina catalyst, a mixture of internal olefin and .alpha.-olefin results, with the more stable internal olefin predominating over the .alpha.-olefin. Obtaining a dehydration product in which the .alpha.-olefin predominates significantly is a challenge since the internal olefin product is the thermodynamically favored product.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,283,027 discloses that thorium oxide and a number of other metal oxides including cerium oxide and other oxides of the rare earths possess the capability of catalyzing the selective dehydration of 2-alcohols to .alpha.-olefins.
Such catalysts have been found to have several disadvantages. For example, thorium oxide is a very insoluble material which makes it a difficult material to apply to a support. Further, when thorium oxide was applied to glass bead support as shown in Example 4 of that patent, it was noted that the catalyst was quite fragile and that thoria fell off the glass beads and caused reactor plugging. When the thorium oxideglass bead catalyst was employed as a catalyst in the dehydration of 4-methyl-2-pentanol, it was noted that at atmospheric pressure the conversion was quite low even at high reaction temperature. In order to actually be commercially attractive, the dehydration catalyst should be durable and should give good conversion and selectivity at atmospheric pressure.
An object of the present invention is to provide a dehydration catalyst that is durable and that is capable of giving good conversion and selectivity to .alpha.-olefin even at atmospheric pressure.
Another object is to provide a method for the production of 4-methyl-1-pentene and 3-methyl-1-butene in various ratios from 4-methyl-2-pentanol and ethylene.